Seamus Heaney is widely acclaimed as the greatest Irish poet since W. B.
Yeats, but he suffers the anxiety of influence from Yeats. Heaney’s anxiety is deeply
rooted in the dilemma of his being unable, or being compelled, both to accept and
to break away from Yeats, whether as a poet or an Irish poet. Heaney, by serving
strategically as a defender and tactically as a breaker of the Yeatsian legacy,
succeeded in overcoming this anxiety, winning himself the subjectivity as a poet and
carrying the Yeatsian legacy forward into the new age.